Taking Centre Stage—Indigenous Australian Activism and Popular Music in the 1980S
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Taking Centre Stage—Indigenous Australian Activism and Popular Music in the 1980s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are advised that this essay includes the names of people that have died. ! It is 20 April, 1979, and darkness cloaks the audience packed into the Apollo Theatre in Adelaide. Suddenly, brightness flashes upon the stage from the lights above. One figure is illuminated. Bob Marley. When his band, The Wailers, begin playing, the audience starts screaming while bouncing in unison to the rhythmic vibrations of electrified reggae rock. Eventually, Marley saunters towards the front of the stage and, without hesitation, leans into the microphone and belts out the lyrics of his politically-charged song, Zimbabwe: "Every man got a right to decide his own destiny, and in this judgment there is no partiality." These messages of international black celebration, which circulated throughout the gig, would provide four young Aboriginal men with the stimulus to form the seminal rock band No Fixed Address. During the 1980s, Aboriginal music elevated the Indigenous Australian experience into the national consciousness at unprecedented proportions. No Fixed Address prefigured this process by pioneering a revolutionary musical style that provided a voice for a new generation of Indigenous Australians. From here, Warumpi Band developed this musical expression and brought it into the mainstream by engaging with Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences alike. Towards the end of the decade, another musical outfit from Yolngu Country, Yothu Yindi, disseminated the ideas articulated by earlier bands to mass commercial audiences around the world. Aboriginal bands used music as an instrument of activism by amplifying voices once stifled. While many Indigenous Australian artists helped facilitate this development, No Fixed Address, Warumpi Band, and Yothu Yindi were especially influential and form the focus of this essay. ! ***! ! ! Aboriginal song and music traditions have been quite well examined, particularly by ethnomusicologists.1 Most influential in the area is Peter Dunbar-Hall and Chris Gibson's Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places (2004), which presents a history of Indigenous Australian music from pre-colonial contact to present, although 1980s music receives scant coverage.2 The study !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 See, for instance, Jim Wafer and Myfany Turpin, Recirculating Songs: Revitalising the Singing Practices of Aboriginal Australians (Hamilton: Hunter Press, 2017); Åse Ottosson, Making Aboriginal Men and Music in Central Australia (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); John Bradley with Yanyuwa Families, Singing Saltwater Country: Journey to the Songlines of Carpentaria (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010). 2 Peter Dunbar-Hall and Chris Gibson, Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places: Contemporary Aboriginal Music in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004). ! of popular Aboriginal music in the 1980s still remains a relatively untilled field. In a general history of that decade, Frank Bongiorno sketches a brief overview of a few prominent Aboriginal bands.3 A number of other works provide extended discussion on the influence of specific Indigenous Australian bands of the 1980s.4 John Castles and Marcus Breen, however, remain the only scholars to offer publications specifically dedicated to exploring Aboriginal rock of the 1980s.5 Still, these authors largely view the different bands of this decade as unconnected groups pursuing unrelated objectives. This paper revises these interpretations by demonstrating that many 1980s Indigenous Australian music groups had in common a preoccupation with contributing to a wider process of cultural and political renewal occurring within Aboriginal communities at the time; whereby Aboriginal Australians began reasserting their identity as First Peoples in contemporary social and political life. Moreover, this essay considers how these connections were entangled with larger transnational and global movements: namely, international musical development and political protest. By building on existing work, this essay seeks to contribute to our understanding of modern Indigenous cultural and political engagement and the place of music within it. ! ***! The transformation of Indigenous Australian music during the 1980s is situated within a broader sweep of music history. Music has always occupied a pivotal position in Aboriginal societies.6 However, when British settlers landed on Australian shores in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and increasingly dispossessed Aboriginal land, they also attempted to proselytise among Indigenous peoples by replacing traditional music and songs with Christian hymns.7 As historian Laura Rademaker shows, missioners launched the most virulent of these evangelical campaigns, using worship music as an “instrument of control” over Aboriginal peoples.8 Musical proselytisation persisted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 Frank Bongiorno, The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (Carlton: Black Inc., 2015), 247-252. 4 See, for instance, AW Hurley, "No Fixed Address, but currently in East Berlin: The Australian Bicentennial, Indigenous Protest and the Festival of Political Song in 1988," Perfect Beat 15, no.2 (2014): 129-148. 5 John Castles, "Tjungaringanyi: Aboriginal Rock (1971-91)," in Sound Alliances: Indigenous Peoples, Cultural Politics and Popular Music in the Pacific, edited by Philip Hayward, 11-25 (London: Cassell, 1993). 6 Breen, ‘Desert Dreams,’ 152-153. 7 Ibid. 8 Laura Rademaker, Found In Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission (University of Hawaii Press: Hawaii, 2018), 170. ! And yet, Aboriginal peoples also transformed Christian music; entangling it with their ceremonial and spiritual life. As Ngarrindjeri musician Leila Rankine has noted, Aboriginal communities have long “related to the hymns” during “a joyous occasion”, as well as after “the passing of a loved one”, making worship music “part of our cultural heritage”. 9 Since colonisation, then, Aboriginal peoples have been adapting and blending newly-arrived musical traditions to promote cultural survival—a trend that would continue long into the future. Popular variety theatre, touring from Europe and America, became one of the dominant entertainment formats offered to settlers during the early-nineteenth century. Eventually becoming known as “vaudeville”, these performances regularly included “blacked up” minstrels singing derogatory “negro songs”.10 Also touring after the abolition of slavery in 1865 were African American jubilee singers.11 With these routines came new genres: most notably, jazz, blues, swing, and gospel.12 Inspired by these shows, Aboriginal vaudeville groups started touring nationwide in the 1920s and became increasingly popular in the 1930s. During their performances, Indigenous musicians used traditional gumleaf instruments to recreate the newly-arrived sounds, some even reconfiguring lyrics for political purposes. 13 One emerging performer, Jimmy Little Senior, drew upon the jubilee melody Jordan River (I’m Bound To Cross)—which referenced escaping slavery—to shine a light on the enduring effects of colonisation in Australia: regularly singing to his audiences that “I came to the river and I couldn’t get across.”14 Radio arrived in Australia during the 1920s and had a major influence on the country's musical soundscape. American genres such as rockabilly, hillbilly, folk, western, blues, and yodelling were transmitted nationwide. 15 These genres almost exclusively explored pastoral themes: horses and cattle, drinking and gambling, love and fighting.16 Younger Indigenous Australians !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 Cited in Marcus Breen, Our Place, Our Music: Australian Popular Music in Perspective (Aboriginal Studies Press: Canberra, 1989), 17.! 10 Kathryn Wells, "Jazz Swing Gumleaf: beneath the mirrors of vaudeville," 1860s-1960s, paper presented at the Musicology Society of Australia National Conference, Perth, 6 December 2018. 11 Ibid. 12 Dunbar-Hall and Gibson, Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places, 5. 13 Ibid. 14 Wells, "Jazz Swing Gumleaf". 15 Dunbar-Hall and Gibson, Deadly Sounds, Deadly Places, 44. 16 Mudrooroo Narrogin, Writing From the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature (South Yarra, Hyland House, 1990), 63. ! began turning their ear to these radiocast genres. 17 The music seemed to reflect the new lifestyles forced upon them by colonisation.18 In the post-war era, Aboriginal musicians adopted these pastoral styles for political purposes: the Australian Aborigines League used the vaudeville format to protest exclusion from Victorian jubilee celebrations by presenting An Aboriginal Moomba; Jimmy Little Junior took his messages to Redfern; and returned Aboriginal soldiers, banned from entering dance halls, created their own jazz clubs.19 During the 1960s, Georgia Lee recorded politically-infused blues melodies while Vincent Lingiari and Ted Egan recorded a song about Gurindji land rights claims—Gurindji Blues.20 Across time, Aboriginal musicians have blended emerging musical genres with traditional music for the purposes of cultural preservation. *** The next major musical advance occurred when rock and roll swept the world during the 1960s and 1970s. As ethnomusicologist Tony Martin explains, other genres performed by Aboriginal artists at the time were reborn under the genre of “country music” and mostly appealed to an